Can We Trust the P-5’s ‘Unanimous Agreement’ of African Representation at the UN Security Council?

In 2023, during the UN General Assembly’s annual debate, the UN president, Dennis Francis, admitted that without structural reform, the effectiveness and legitimacy of the UN Security Council will only be further compromised. He further stated that while conflict continues to spread across the world, the UN remains paralyzed mostly because of the divisions within the P-5 (i.e., the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States) and their competing interests. For context, there have been calls for equitable representation in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) since the 1960s. In 1963, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) recommended that the UNSC be expanded to include ten non-permanent members. In 2021, Ethiopia’s president, Abiy Ahmed, made an appeal that the African Union be represented in the UNSC; and, in 2016, the C-10 (African Union’s Committee of Ten Heads of State) pointed out the worsening marginalization within the UNSC and the need for structural reform. In 2021, the president of the 75th session of the UNGA, Volkan Bozkir, argued that the council’s preventative tools and mechanisms are in desperate need of review. Only recently have those calls been further pronounced especially as the organization failed to land on a unified position concerning the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas war.